We know that James Cameron tried to get his hooks into a Spider-Man movie in the early 1990s. But he also gave the X-Men a brief whirl with a studio pitch written by his then-wife (and future Hurt Locker director) Kathryn Bigelow. In a talk at Columbia University last Saturday, pioneering X-Men scribe Chris Claremont recalled how he and Stan Lee attempted to sell Marvel's merry mutants to Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment in 1990.

And if Claremont had his druthers, one-time Super Mario Bob Hoskins would star as the pint-sized brawler Wolverine (Claremont was impressed with the actor's performance in the 1984 flick Lassiter) and Angela Bassett would've been cast as Storm. Explained the author, who was on hand to donate his archives to the school:

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Just think about this for a minute: James Cameron's X-Men. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. That's what we were playing [...] So we're chatting. And at one point Stan looks at Cameron and says, 'I hear you like Spider-Man.' Cameron's eyes lit up.

And they start talking. And talking. And talking. About 20 minutes later all the Lightstorm guys and I are looking at each other, and we all know the X-Men deal has just evaporated. Kathryn goes off and writes a screen treatment for X-Men that was eaten alive by all the idiots who have a piece of Spider-Man because Marvel during its evolution has sold off the rights time and time and time again.

To Carolco. To Universal. To this to that. To Fox. It was just a nightmare.